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Divided Government, Deadlock and the Survival of Presidents and Presidential Regimes

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Divided Government, Deadlock and the Survival of Presidents and Presidential Regimes Divided Government, Deadlock and the Survival of Presidents and Presidential Regimes José Antonio Cheibub University of Pennsylvania [email protected] Presented at the conference “Constitutional Design 2000,” December 9-11, 1999, Center for Continuing Education, University of Notre Dame Introduction1 Of the 133 transitions to and from democracy that occurred in the world between 1946 and 1996, 59 took place in Latin America.2 Early theorizing on the causes of political instability in the region has tended to focus on structural variables -- the degree of dependency, the level of inequality, poverty, and so on -- which supposedly created conditions that were conducive to the demise of democratic regimes. Recent research has moved away from this focus on economic and social conditions and has concentrated instead on the impact of institutional features on the survival and operation of democracy in Latin America. Stimulated by the formulations first advanced by Juan Linz (1994),3 the breakdown of democratic regimes and the alleged “crisis of governability” of new democracies have been attributed to presidentialism, which, in combination with permissive electoral systems and weakly institutionalized political parties produce divided governments, deadlocks, institutional paralysis and, ultimately, the breakdown of democratic institutions. Yet, Latin American democracies, all of which are presidential, survive in many countries, even as governments implement policies aimed at radically restructuring their economies. This fact suggests that we need to take another look at arguments that attribute to presidentialism a causal impact on regime instability in Latin America. Or at least that we need to reconsider the causal mechanisms that are allegedly responsible for presidentialism's relatively poor performance. The purpose of this paper is to do so by examining empirically the factors that, according to the prevailing view, should account for variation in the performance of presidential regimes. The goal is to probe whether the factors usually identified as the reasons for presidentialism's (poor) political and economic performance are capable of explaining, as they should if they were indeed important, observed variation in the outcomes produced by presidential regimes. Performance is understood here in a narrow sense. I am primarily concerned with longevity of presidential regimes and the survival of presidents and their parties in office. I also examine some aspects related to economic performance under presidential regimes. There are several other aspects of performance that are potentially interesting but which are not examined in this paper. The paper is based on data for all presidential and mixed regimes between 1946 and 1996. Due to variation in the availability of data, particularly of economic data, many analyses are based on 1 This work was supported in part by grants from the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation and the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics. I thank Amel Ahmed and Dan Miodownik for valuable research assistance. I also thank Argelina Figueiredo, Fernando Limongi and Scott Mainwaring for comments on earlier drafts. 2 This represents 44.4% of all transitions, concentrated in 23 countries. The remaining 74 transitions were spread among the other 166 countries. These numbers come from Alvarez et al. (1996) and the author’s update. 3 See also Linz (1990a; 1990b). -1- slightly different samples, covering a shorter period of time and/or a smaller set of countries. The primary focus of the paper is on pure presidential regimes. Often, however, mixed systems are included in order to assess whether their presence modifies what is found for pure presidential regimes. It can be anticipated here that, despite some significant institutional features regarding presidential veto and term limits, the inclusion of mixed systems does not modify any of the findings about pure presidential regimes. The appendix contains a brief discussion of the criteria utilized to classify the regimes, a list of the countries included in the data set and the definition of other variables used in the analysis. The paper is organized as follows. The next session assesses the extent to which presidential regimes are characterized by divided government and examines the impact of partisan and electoral variables on the incidence of divided government. The following session does the same for “deadlock” situations. Next, the impact of divided governments and deadlock on the survival of presidential regimes is examined, followed by an analysis of their impact on the accountability of presidents with respect to economic outcomes. The paper concludes by situating the findings in the context of the debate about the merits of presidentialism relative to parliamentarism, and suggesting ways in which research on this issue could be advanced. Divided Government in Presidential Regimes Conventional wisdom concerning presidential regimes suggests that they are prone to deadlocks between executives and legislatures, which would explain their high degree of instability and relatively poor economic performance. The absence of mechanisms for the resolution of conflicts between the president and congress within the existing constitutional framework generates incentives for actors to search for extra-constitutional means of resolving their differences. At the same time, by frequently generating situations in which decisions cannot be made, it prevents governments from dealing with important economic issues. Thus, executive-legislative relations in presidential regimes are thought to be characterized by conflict and deadlock, with important repercussions for the very survival of the regime and its economic performance. Studies of the performance of presidential regimes tend to postulate the negative consequences of divided governments and deadlock for the performance of presidents and presidential regimes, and then proceed to study the conditions that are more likely to produce divided government and deadlock.4 Valuable as they are in helping understand the institutional conditions that are more likely to produce presidents with legislative majorities (the type of electoral system, the number of parties, and the electoral cycle are the most important variables identified in this literature), these studies offer little evidence to the effect that divided government and deadlock are frequent in presidential regimes, or that these regimes' performance is indeed affected by the (allegedly) pervasiveness of divided governments and deadlock. Demonstrating, for instance, that proportional representation systems, multipartism or non-concurrent elections are more likely to 4 For examples, see Jones (1995a), Mainwaring (1993), Carey (1997) and Mainwaring and Shugart (1997). -2- produce presidents who lack a legislative majority is not, however, sufficient empirical grounds to conclude either that proportional systems, multipartism or non-concurrent elections, or that the divided governments they are likely to produce, are bad for the performance of presidential regimes. Electoral systems, party systems and electoral cycles may indeed affect the president's legislative support and produce divided governments. Whether they induce deadlock, or affect performance, however, is another question. In this section I examine the incidence of divided government and deadlock in presidential democracies. Divided government is defined as the situation in which the party of the sitting president does not control a majority of seats in Congress.5 Divided government is a frequent occurrence in presidential regimes: in about 61% of the years the party of the president did not control a majority of seats in Congress. This rate is lower if we only consider pure presidential regimes (58%), particularly in unicameral systems (48%). Still, almost half of the years in these systems were of divided government. As suggested by Mainwaring (1993) and others, the president’s legislative support is associated with the number of political parties. The frequency with which the party of the president does not hold a majority in Congress increases markedly with the number of effective parties: in pure presidential regimes it goes from 38.67% of the years when there is no more than two parties, to 41.01% when there are two to three parties, 89.43% when there are three to four parties, 90.38% when there are 4 to 5 parties, to almost all the years when there are more than five parties. *** Table 1 here *** The timing of presidential and congressional elections also seem to affect the likelihood of divided government. Table 2 shows that unified governments are more frequent when presidential and congressional elections coincide (54.22%) than when they do not coincide (60.26%) or are held alternately concurrently and non-concurrently (65.57%). Note, however, that this is not due to a larger number of parties in systems with non-concurrent or alternating presidential and legislative elections. Even though expectations are that the number of parties, and hence the likelihood of divided government, will be higher when presidential and congressional elections do not coincide, this is not what we observe in this data. As we can see in table 3, the frequency with which we observe two-party systems is higher when presidential and congressional elections are not concurrent. At the same time, systems with two to four parties are more frequent when elections coincide than when they
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